Joe Dante, king of enjoyable hard-edged family films \u2013 how did it go wrong?<\/p>\n
Burying The Ex<\/strong><\/em> is a simple tale of a man who regrets moving in with his girlfriend. There\u2019s some fun to be had in Anton Yelchin\u2019s dilemma, as he finds that killing your zombified ex (Ashley Greene) isn\u2019t as easy as it looks in horror movies, but on the whole the film is a muddle of clich\u00e9s.<\/p>\n The film is at its best in the all-too-brief moments where it cuts loose and indulges in pure comedy horror, and Greene\u2019s performance ironically comes to life once the poorly written Evelyn is dead.<\/p>\n But the film suffers from being entirely unsure of its audience. The characters swear and talk graphically about threesomes, and yet the film is incredibly coy. It\u2019s the sort of movie where people somehow have sex fully clothed and all the violence is unseen, even though it\u2019s cartoony. It\u2019s like Dante wants to make a more grown-up film than he\u2019s known for, but he keeps veering instinctively towards a PG tone.<\/p>\n No-one involved in the film ever seems to have met a young person or a woman (one poor girl has to deliver the line \u201cOMFingG\u201d). Max, a \u2018nice guy\u2019, is predictably caught between his uptight ex and a horror-loving Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a trope which is getting pretty tired.<\/p>\n The film is stuffed full of horror references and aimed at genre lovers, and yet there is nothing in the film that is new. Clich\u00e9s are ticked off routinely, with no attempt to subvert them. Yelchin sleepwalks through the movie, with only Greene\u2019s neurotic zombie providing any entertainment value.<\/p>\n Had this movie come out in 2013, it might have been hailed as a moderate success. But it misses the zeitgeist by a couple of years and has the misfortune of arriving on the heels of the far superior Life After Beth<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n By comparison, Burying The Ex<\/strong><\/em> is stale, predictable and \u2013 the ultimate fail of a horror-comedy \u2013 neither funny nor scary.<\/p>\n